The importance of AMP and ranking high on local search.
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The Importance of AMP “accelerated mobile performance” A site must be mobile-friendly

 

AMP is a new open source initiative that stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. AMP is meant to improve the web browsing experience by decreasing page load times and is Mobile friendly. 

Here are a few of the most exciting advantages of AMP: 

  •  It speeds up website load time 

According to a study from Google, 53% of website visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes longer than 3 seconds to load. AMP has a set of standards which all contribute to decreased page load time. A few of these guidelines include asynchronous JavaScript, resources sized statically (such as images and ads), only inline CSS, etc. Page load times have been shown to have a great influence on traffic and user engagement and are always a very important measurement for site owners to be monitoring.

 

  • Enhanced SEO 

As the web becomes increasingly mobile, it is important for publishers to pay attention to their search rankings beyond the desktop browser. Because page load time is already a factor in SEO, and since this initiative is being speared by Google, AMP pages will eventually be prioritized in their search algorithms and have a positive effect on SERPs.

 

  •   Low bounce rate 

A great side effect of faster loading pages is that your visitors are less likely to leave. Publishers who implement AMP should see a decreased bounce rate and most likely overall increased time spent on site stats. 

 

  •  The potential for increased ad views 

Because the HTML is coded in a way to enhance the overall usability of banners and images, there should be a higher ad view-ability rate, hopefully also increasing a publisher’s ability to monetize their site.

 

Please contact Savvy Sister to evaluate your website to see if it is a good candidate for AMP.

 

 

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avoiding pop up ads makes a better user experience - woman sitting at computer smiling
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User Experience and the Coalition for Better Ads

User experience is paramount in the new Chrome.

By way of explaining this, let’s travel back in time to the 1900s. Waaaaaay back in the early 1990s when AOL, Earthlink, and Yahoo were what people were using to browse the web, online advertising was in its infancy. Ads were strictly placement ads on specific websites, and sites were, believe it or not, actually indexed by human beings who would read content on a page and determine what type of query that page would satisfy. It was the wild west for online advertising because anything flashy, huge, multi-colored, and attention-grabbing was permitted.

avoiding pop up ads makes a better user experience - woman sitting at computer smiling

For best user experience, avoid pop-up ads and promotions on your site as much as possible.

Fast forward to late 1990s and early 2000, some genius college students realized what a horrible experience browsing the web was and decided to change that. Introducing Google. Google search engine was groundbreaking in that it would not show results that were paid, it would show results that were RELEVANT to the query.

Without getting into the AdWords bidding system, let’s just say that the algorithm scored “documents” (landing pages) based on their relevance to a query, and the amount that webpage owner was bidding to show their ad was a factor, but not the deciding factor. This immediately raised the bar for user experience. No longer were users at the mercy of the highest bidder. Google was the first browser to be user-centric and, therefore, rapidly became the most popular browser in the online world.

Since then, Google has set the standard for not only what is a good user experience, but what is an appropriate ad. Ads can no longer make outrageous guarantees or bait-and-switch. Advertisers are held to a fairly high standard because it’s built into the search engine algorithm that if the query does not match the information (images and text) on the page, that page ranks very low in both paid and organic results.

Now, a new level of filtering is coming into play, and it’s largely due to the findings of the Coalition for Better Ads. The role of the Coalition for Better Ads is to, like Google, ensure that the internet is a PLEASANT experience for users, users find search results helpful, and advertisers are held to a very high standard of integrity and ad quality.

The Coalition for Better Ads has actually indexed sites that offer poor user experiences, and the new Google Chrome Ad Filter, which is built right into the browser, is utilizing this data to determine which ads show and which don’t. In other words, if your site offers a terrible user experience because of pop-ups, flashing text or distracting animations, or if your site has videos that auto-play, or prestitial ads with a countdown (the ad covers the page until the countdown ends), the Coalition for Better Ads has probably deemed your site “correlated with an increased propensity for consumers to adopt ad blockers.” That’s a mouthful, but it basically means the site is annoying, misleading or distracting to a user, and, therefore, is NOT offering a good user experience.

In summary, do NOT put pop-ups on your site.

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